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Let’s be honest — when it comes to digital transformation, I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir. The fact that you’re reading this at all tells me you’re well aware of the many benefits of digitizing work processes and customer journeys. But since we’re being honest, let’s admit that not everyone is as clued in as you are. In fact, a time may come — maybe tomorrow, maybe even today — when you’ll have to make the case for digital transformation to a decision maker who — how shall we put this? — doesn’t quite get it.

We’ve got your back.

When that day comes, you’ll be ready. Because here, without further ado, are the seven key benefits of digital transformation — broken down, cleaned up, and spelled out for maximum persuasiveness with minimal effort on your part. You’re welcome. Go forth and evangelize.

Because you’re bound to hear it, we’ll kick this off with the obvious question: What is digital transformation?

Simply put, it’s the process of integrating digital technologies into the various aspects of a business — resulting in fundamental changes to its operations, processes, and customer experiences. It’s a mouthful — but well worth the effort.

That brings us to the obvious follow-up: Why should we care?

Because money — or to put it more elegantly, ROI. In fact, when rolled out strategically, digital transformation can enhance your return on investment in a number of ways. Let’s run through the top seven.

1. Improved efficiency and productivity. Digital transformation enables new forms of automation, streamlined workflows, and the elimination of any number of inefficient manual processes. These changes — which can range from new modes of collaboration to new levels of flexibility and scalability through the adoption of cloud-based services — can, in turn, enhance operational efficiency, cut costs, and boost productivity, ultimately increasing ROI.
2. Enhanced customer experience. Digital transformation lets businesses understand and respond to customer needs more effectively. Data analytics and digital processes and tools can provide powerful insights into customer behavior and preferences — enabling highly personalized marketing, finely targeted advertising, and improved customer service. The resulting surge in customer satisfaction and loyalty will drive revenue and ultimately boost ROI.
3. Data-driven decisions: Digital transformation generates huge quantities of timely, actionable data that can be collected, analyzed, and leveraged to inform business decisions. As noted above, data analytics and BI tools can offer valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and operational performance — surfacing opportunities, limiting risk, and enhancing business performance.
4. Expanded reach: Digital transformation expands businesses’ market reach by making geography moot — not always, of course, but often enough to be game-changing. Online platforms, digital marketing, and e-commerce open the door to an always-on global audience — which can bring prodigious growth in sales volumes and market share. Once again: Ka-ching!
5. Cost optimization. Here, the sky is pretty much the limit. Consider cloud computing, which cuts infrastructure costs and software and hardware expenditures while providing pay-as-you-go pricing. Other digital solutions save money by automating processes, reducing manual effort, and reducing errors — all of which will be reflected in an improved bottom line.
6. Innovation and competitive advantage. Embarking on this journey of digital transformation sparks innovation internally and gives you a leg-up on the competition. Changes in processes, operations, and customer experience will spawn new products and services that meet customers where they are — or want to be — and address their new expectations, adding to that competitive edge.
7. Agility and adaptability. Digital transformation makes businesses more flexible, agile, and adaptable — enabling them to pivot quickly, scale seamlessly, and test new ideas in real time as market dynamics and customer demands evolve. This agility means businesses can seize opportunities nimbly as they arise — a recipe for profitability and growth.

Let’s be clear: When it comes to ROI, there is no magic bullet. For digital transformation to succeed, careful planning, meticulous execution, and constant evaluation are needed to make sure business goals and customer needs and expectations stay in sync. But with a solid strategy to keep your efforts grounded, digital transformation can be the key to revving up your ROI — and that’s good news for any business.

LEARN MORE ABOUT DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

It’s time to stop experimenting with digital experiences and start walking the walk. For years, organizations have been iterating in a crawl-walk-run cycle that seems to never get them fully digitized. To break the cycle, organizations must take bold steps that allow them to actually become digital.

Going digital means full participation in the Digital+ Economy: a hyperconnected world where employees, customers, and partners all come together to do their part in achieving common goals through innovation and problem-solving. Call it “entering the age of co-creation.”

Organizations can’t just be a little digital or partially digital if they intend to extract all of the benefits of the Digital+ Economy — velocity, agility, and competitiveness. They must commit fully. And that means adopting a mindset that differs from how most organizations have tackled digital transformation in the past. It means prioritizing the three all-important groups of stakeholders — employees, customers, and partners — while building new systems and environments. This way, all stakeholders can contribute to company-wide goals by leveraging resources in a positive, collaborative way to deliver the desired outcomes.

But how do you get there? A lot of moving, interconnected parts come into play for companies to achieve the state of being digital. Three main components must be in place — structure, data, and automation. Without them it’s difficult, if not impossible, for an organization to reach its full digital potential.

Set the Foundation
Everything starts with the structural underpinnings that enable a digital environment. The foundation needs to be composable. That’s a term you are sure to hear more and more as companies digitize.

A composable architecture provides the rock-solid bed upon which an organization can build flexible and scalable tools that provide the right experience to its stakeholders. Composition makes it possible to integrate any number of third-party tools and services that empower

stakeholders to collaborate and innovate, both in addressing current needs and anticipating future challenges and opportunities.

A composable approach enables modularity, so users can take pieces of previous projects and apply them as they work on new ones. Organizations gain the flexibility to put different pieces together as they see fit — and to satisfy customer preferences. This approach is enhanced by the ability to mix and match tools and services that drive velocity and flexibility without the restraints of vendor lock-in.

Put the Data to Work
With a composable structure in place, it gets easier for organizations to make use of their data. Remember, everything starts with data — where you get it, what it means, and how you use it. For many organizations, this hasn’t always been easy because data comes in fast and furiously from different sources in various formats.

With the right tools, data doesn’t have to be mysterious or scary. And it needs to be made available to all relevant parties so they all can leverage it in their jobs. Of course, this requires a governed approach to ensure that any data subjected to regulatory compliance is properly handled and secured.

A democratic approach to data also requires making digitization tools available anywhere that stakeholder – be it employees, customers or partners – need to access it. After all, being digital means giving everyone the capacity to engage with data where, when, and how they need it.

Automate Repeatable Processes
Digital organizations automate everything that can be automated, and this usually starts with repeatable, predictable processes that are time-consuming when handled manually. Automation provides the velocity that digital organizations need, empowering users to make decisions fast enough to keep up with digital ecosystems and the power of personalization.

This means that with automation, companies can accelerate decisions to shape and deliver outcomes. Automation also delivers velocity in content creation. It takes everything an organization creates, no matter where, and helps the organization deliver it into the right hands at the right moment.

Once an organization is able to get these three components in place, it can reach the state of being digital. It is able to walk the digital walk — to push the boundaries of innovation by enabling all stakeholders to actively and collaboratively participate in shaping its future.

Hear from Liz Miller of Constellation Research on what it means to be digital, today and tomorrow.

The real benefit of digital transformation is that it dares organizations to dream.

With the right automation, digitization tools and skill sets, companies can turn aspirations into achievements that otherwise would remain out of reach.

From Virtual to Real
But worthy achievements require vision. One of the technology trends that is currently inspiring company planners to dream is the metaverse. It has the potential for immersive, personalized, collaborative experiences by integrating augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) with the internet. With its ability to connect people and technologies from virtually anywhere, the metaverse is a realm worth exploring for organizations of all types.

Through gaming and other immersive interactions, companies could leverage the metaverse to present products and services in new ways. They can stage scenarios to gauge utility and user satisfaction. For manufacturing giant 3M, for instance, the metaverse could serve as a virtual showcase for products, complete with virtual store aisles where retailers can get ideas to display items, says Rick Fryar, IT architect at 3M.

Retailers could develop virtual planograms that reveal how products would look on shelves, how consumers would see them, and how the displays might affect store traffic patterns. Virtual secret shoppers could even offer feedback on layout and presentation.

The use of the metaverse isn’t confined to retail, of course. Manufacturers have started leveraging it to design and test products. Some companies use it for training and employee onboarding. Other organizations have started using the metaverse to test out practices and tasks in areas such as surgery and machine maintenance.

Getting ‘Twitchy’
In addition to the metaverse, organizations that embrace digital transformation have plenty of other options to explore digital offerings.

Financial services company BMO is taking advantage of the live streaming platform, Twitch, to better know its customers. To that end, the company’s marketing team launched a Twitch channel to engage customers through gaming and conversations with bank employees.

These interactions create opportunities for the bank to learn about customer needs that can be matched to relevant products and services, says Ali Kazerani, Senior Manager of Marketing Strategy at BMO. Through the channel, bank employees can share information with less-experienced patrons about mortgage planning or how to manage savings accounts, to name a few.

Twitch-based conversations feel comfortable to customers and deliver positive results, Kazerani says. And they could be replicated in a number of other company-specific settings.

Live streaming isn’t the only innovative digital tool at BMO. The financial services company has been A/B testing artificial intelligence (AI) for customer service personalization. When users log on to their accounts, they can view personalized, contextualized content.

And personalization matters to all customers. According to Gartner, “71% of B2C and 86% of B2B customers expect companies to be well informed about their personal information during an interaction.”

BMO is also looking at transactional data to refine its offerings. For instance, by analyzing data from a declined credit card transaction, the bank can prepare its call center staff for an interaction with the cardholder that can lead to a much faster resolution of the customer’s issue.

Other tried-and-true practices to engage customers include the use of SEO. 3M, for instance, has leveraged it in its globalization strategy to build country-specific content, which makes it easier for customers to find information on the company’s websites.

When Marketing and IT Collaborate
While digital transformation opens numerous paths to innovation, success requires the right mindset. Marketing professionals need to have an open mind about ideas that originate in other departments and the tools to employ to achieve their goals.

Collaboration between the marketing and IT departments is essential. The teams should work together to set expectations and timelines. This fosters a spirit of collaboration and trust, resulting in a joint sense of achievement when a project is successful.

Having the right technology is also important. Organizations need the tools and platforms that provide flexibility to pivot when necessary — to make course corrections when a project isn’t going quite as expected. A gradual approach to digital transformation typically works best, allowing organizations to introduce one service at a time and learn from each one.

That’s why the use of the minimum viable product (MVP) model, which enables the introduction of a product with just enough features to draw interest, can help make a quick determination of whether something will work. Both 3M and BMO have leveraged the model in their digitization journeys — watch this video to learn more.

With the proper tools, mindset, and practices, companies can set their sights on the digital future and turn their aspirations into real business outcomes. Curious about the solution enabling this innovative approach? Request a demo of HCL Digital Experience or learn more here.

With digital transformation well under way at most organizations, business leaders have to empower their citizen developers to innovate and solve problems. That means allowing business users to create digital experiences, applications and services that make meaningful contributions to their company’s agility and ability to compete in dynamic markets.

Velocity and repeatability are essential. With the right resources in place, citizen developers can access exactly what they need to quickly develop applications that automate and improve their processes. Too often, organizations lack these resources.

The result is the untapped potential of citizen developers. When employees encounter inefficiencies in business processes, they don’t have a simple, proven way to solve them. There is no process in place to access the data or resources they need to come up with a custom solution. And they don’t have an easy, productive way to interact with business colleagues or professional developers to get a project off the ground.

These challenges aren’t insurmountable. They can be addressed with a digital experience platform that pulls all the relevant resources together to deliver a consistent, productive approach for citizen developers. Yet it’s not that simple! Such a platform must empower citizen developers to be autonomous in their endeavors, while ensuring IT governance is keeping the organization safe.

A digital experience platform enshrines a “governed” approach to building experiences, handling content and integrating with the company’s enterprise systems enables organizations to keep a handle on creativity and innovation when it comes to data projects and application development.

“Governed” means all the controls are in place to achieve compliance with privacy regulations and minimize security vulnerabilities that can unintentionally open the door to cyberattacks. These controls set the standards for the “who” and “what” of data: who can handle the data and what data can be collected.

Rogue Developers

Without governed processes that follow sound IT standards and best practices, companies may end up with chaotic, unsafe business operations. Instead of properly sanctioned citizen developers, an organization ends up with rogue developers and a shadow IT.

For instance, projects involving personal identifying information (PPI) may get under way without oversight from IT and compliance professionals, potentially opening the organization to regulatory trouble.

Or, for the sake of expediency — or to get around IT roadblocks — one team can take the initiative to procure a SaaS solution. This leads to the all-too-common issue of “shadow IT,” when computing resources become part of the environment without proper compliance, security, or validation by IT staff.

This creates friction. While the organization wants to empower its citizen developers (and the business as a whole), it doesn’t mean giving them carte blanche to use whatever digital tools they want. What’s the solution to turn this around? How does a company create a positive experience to unleash the collaborative and creative potential in citizen developers without running afoul of regulations or unintentionally inviting security breaches?

The Composition Platform

When citizen developers are autonomous, they can easily collaborate with professional developers when needed, and this encourages innovation. For that to happen, organizations should embrace the concept of a “composition platform.”

“This means implementing a digital experience platform that enables citizen developers to build what they need, including integrating third-party tools and services in minutes. The platform can harness the skills of business users and computing professionals so they can work together to solve business challenges and innovate.

With a composition platform, organizations avoid “vendor lock-in,” instead leveraging multiple options for mixing and matching tools that address current needs and anticipate future requirements.

Think of this as the “salad bar” approach to delivering solutions to business challenges using enterprise resources that are familiar with their business needs, goals and customers first-hand.

Salad bars always have lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and other ingredients considered essential. The same goes for the composition platform; it includes basic building blocks such as personalization, content, assets, as well as various reusable components used in previous experiences that business users (citizen developers) can easily assemble in minutes.

As discussed in this video, the composition platform approach can make a big difference in a company’s agility and ability to innovate in order to solve business problems and seize market opportunities.

Instead of thinking about where your digital experience platform (DXP) should be headed or whether you should use a headless CMS or not, consider that HCL DX empowers a business-meaningful contribution to digitization transformation with real outcomes in days rather than weeks.

How? By giving an option of using the right tool and company resource — citizen and/or professional developer — to get the job done.

Learn more about a composable DXP and how it can help fit your organization’s needs by getting a free demo.

The latest releases of Leap and Domino Leap came a few weeks ago, with new innovations and improvements right out of the gate.

Our goal is always to release Leap and Domino Leap updates around the same time.  Most of the code is the same.  Just a few platform-specific features are the only differences.  In fact, it’s possible to build on Leap and move your app to Domino Leap – and vice versa! – in most cases.

HCL Leap 9.3.2 
HCL Leap 9.3.2 is now available in an Open Liberty container for deployment in a Kubernetes environment.

This is our first step in taking Leap into a cloud-native model. It simplifies the deployment and maintenance associated with running Leap on a traditional WebSphere deployment.

A second step in this direction will come with the next release, including support for PostgreSQL.  This will provide an open source database option to DB2 and Oracle, which most cloud vendors provide as part of their standard catalog, to help streamline how you run Leap.

Domino Leap 1.1.1 
HCL Domino Leap 1.1.1 now supports attachments in the context of rich text fields (RTFs) that are populated via Domino Database services.  This means that attachments that are placed in the body of a rich text field in Notes will appear in the body of the rich text field in Leap.

In the past, attachments were dropped to the bottom of the field in Leap, causing you to sometimes lose context of their placement in the field.

Custom Widget API Tech Preview
We’re really excited about this part! Both HCL Leap 9.3.2 and Domino Leap 1.1.1 include a tech preview of the new Custom Widget API.

This API gives IT professionals the ability to add new custom widgets to Leap’s pallet.  Do your users need new custom functionality?  Does your organization have an investment in design system and web components that you use across your digital properties?

The Leap Custom Widget API gives you the opportunity to extend Leap to fit your requirements. It’s in tech preview now and if you are interested, we’d like to hear from you.

We are looking for feedback before releasing this as a fully supported product feature.  You can find documentation and a few samples here.